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MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser says that this happy alignment with Barack Obama’s agenda -- and fortuitous absence of conflict with the same -- comes in part because “the people he’s listening to and the people we’re listening to are the same people.”

Will MoveOn live up to its name?

After more than a decade spent railing against the Republican machine, MoveOn wants to move on —even if it means leaving some of its high-minded ideals behind.

Last week, the group’s members chose their top four priorities for the organization, winnowed down from a top-10 list culled from 50,000 suggestions. The decisions they weighed would determine in large part whether the group would become a friend or foe of the Obama administration, a player or a gadfly in progressive politics, a piece of the Democratic machine or a thorn in the party’s side.

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What they chose: universal health care; economic recovery and job creation; building a green economy/stopping climate change; and end the war in Iraq.

What they didn’t: holding the Bush administration accountable; fighting for gay rights and LGBT equality; and reforming campaigns and elections.

MoveOn Executive Director Eli Pariser says that this happy alignment with Barack Obama’s agenda — and fortuitous absence of conflict with same — comes in part because “the people he’s listening to and the people we’re listening to are the same people.”

But it also may be a sign that MoveOn’s members want to move ahead – and that they’re willing to make some ideological sacrifices in exchange for real progress.

“Parties become much more pragmatic when they’ve won,” says Joe Trippi, who heads the media firm Trippi Multimedia, and who managed Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign and advised John Edwards in 2008.

“At least in the initial stages, they’re going to try to work together [with Obama] to see what parts of their agenda they can get through,” he says. And they recognize, he adds, that they will get more of their agenda passed if they don’t start trouble when they don’t need to.

If anything can be read into MoveOn’s silence on Rick Warren — the anti-gay-marriage pastor Obama has chosen to deliver his inaugural invocation — Trippi is correct.

But there is danger, some say, in allowing the majority to sacrifice purity for concrete gains, particularly if the minority strongly opposes the decision. Says John Hlinko, president and CEO of Grassroots Enterprise, a bi-partisan online advocacy and strategy firm: “If there’s a big enough faction — people can self organize now — it is not inconceivable that some faction could split off, some kind of extreme faction that thinks they’re the purer one.”

In addition, argues Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, founder of the liberal blog Daily Kos, MoveOn can actually help the administration by remaining visible and vocal rather than pulling its punches. He notes that the right won’t stop agitating for its agenda, so the left must continue to make demands in order to keep the momentum. “I don’t think that it’s necessarily a bad thing for the administration,” he says. “A lot of times they can offer them political cover to do the right thing.”